Salting things up in the sysadmin's world

SaltStack is a thriving configuration management system written in Python that leverages YAML and Jinja2 which, by now, probably needs no introduction.

This talk will cover a brief summary of why we need configuration management tools, followed by a full dive into SaltStack, its features, pros and cons, how to use it and how to extend it. By the end of this talk you will have gone from knowing little or nothing about SaltStack, to being able to deploy your own setup.

This talk will be targeted to either seasoned Python developers who are taking their first steps in the system administration world, or established system administrators who secretly love Python and prefer to stay away of configuration management systems based on other languages. Its advisable that attendees have some familiarity with Python as well as with system administration concepts. Also, this presentation will be focused on GNU/Linux systems, so it is expected that attendees are comfortable with some of its concepts.